Eye tracking to analyze the effects of clutter and stress on performance in real time -

Abstract

E-commerce websites have come to form an integral part of people’s web activity, with increasingly large numbers relying on such websites for their purchases. However, the design of e-commerce websites does not always support users in making their purchase quickly and effectively. A major design problem with such websites is clutter, or data overload. Clutter can be defined as the presence of a large amount of task-irrelevant data that leads to slower and less accurate task performance. However, it is not yet clear how best to assess clutter in websites and how to use that knowledge to develop the optimal display. In addition, clutter is not a fixed construct, and might vary among different users and in different situations. There is thus a need to develop techniques to evaluate clutter 1) in a way that reflects user factors and 2) in real time. In this way, display adjustments can be triggered immediately, before performance breakdowns occur. Eye tracking is one promising tool to do that, but it is not yet known which eye tracking metrics are best suited for real-time clutter detection in the context of e-commerce websites. The goals of this research were thus to identify what display features contribute the most to delays in e-commerce websites, determine whether and to what extent clutter and time pressure interact to bring about performance decrements, and identify the eye tracking metrics that best reflect clutter in e-commerce websites. To this end, an experiment was carried out with college students in which they were asked to search for certain targets as part of an online purchasing task. Performance and eye tracking data were collected from the experiment, and these were combined with clutter measures obtained from image processing algorithms in order to identify the eye tracking metrics that best reflect clutter. This research contributed to the literature on clutter and eye tracking and will have the potential to help improve the design of e-commerce websites.